Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “I think it’s sad,” I said. “They’re carting off all of our valuables, like common thieves.”

  Until then, F&L had contented themselves with bombing us silly day and night. The steady northward stream of goods, art, and statuary had only started in the past week. It should have been a clear sign that the war was about to change again. After all, F&L, with their fungal mines, bombs, and bullets, seemed to have a direct line to a certain disenfranchised underground group.

  “Actually, Janice,” Duncan said, as he dipped his ugly toes in the Moth, “I hesitate to try to convince you otherwise, but I think the sight of Voss Bender’s head floating vaingloriously down the Moth is very funny. So much effort by old F&L, and for what? What can they possibly think they will do with these ‘remains’ when they reach Morrow? Rework the marble into columns for some public building? Reassemble the statue? And if so, where in Truff ’s name would they put it? We hardly knew where to put it ourselves.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sad, too.”

  Did I already say that there came to be the most terrible of Festival nights? It burned down the Borges Bookstore. It stopped the war between F&L and H&S. It stopped the love between Duncan and Mary, too. Snapped it. Was no more. Never again. {It brought an end to many things, this is true. But the Festival had nothing to do with ending my relationship with Mary. I caused that all by myself.} There had never been a Festival like it, except, perhaps, during the time of the Burning Sun. There may never be another like it again. {Why would there need to be? Every week since the Shift began, some part of the city is as raw as during Festival time.}

  As far as I can remember, our father had never had anything to say about the Festival. {Not true. In his essay “The Question of Ambergris,” he wrote [I paraphrase from memory]: “At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.” Statements like this led me to my explorations of Ambergris. I remember trying to read my father’s essays at an early age, and only understanding them in fragments and glimpses. I loved the mystery of that, and the sense of adventure, of the questions implied by what I could understand.} However, he did say one or two things about the gray caps. I recall that at the dinner table he would ramble on about his current studies. He had no gift for providing context. He would sit at the table, looking down at his mashed potatoes as he scratched the back of his head with one hand and pushed his fork through his food with the other. There was always about him at these times a faraway look, as if he were figuring something out in his head even as he talked to us. Sometimes, it would be a kind of muttering chant under his breath. At other times he was genuinely talking to us but was really elsewhere. He smelled of limes back then, our mother having insisted he wear some cologne to combat the smell of old books brought back from the rare book room of the Stockton Library. But since he hated cologne, he would cut up a lime instead and anoint himself with its juice. {I enjoyed that smell of books, though, missed it when it was gone—it was a comfortable, old-fashioned smell, usually mixed with the dry spice of cigar smoke. I came to feel that it was the smell of learning, which provoked the sweat not of physical exertion, but of mental exertion. To me, book must and cigar smoke were the product of working brains.}

  At one such dinner, he looked up at us and he said, “The gray caps are quite simple, really. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. So long as what you’re doing doesn’t interfere with their plans, they don’t care what you do—even if you cause one of them physical harm. But if somehow you step across the tripwire of one of their ‘activities,’ why, then, there is nothing that can save you.”

  {I remember that, too. “Tripwire.” A word I’d never heard before he used it. Why did he use that word? It fascinated me. While teaching at Blythe, I used the term in connection with the Silence. Had the Silence been caused by some kind of triggering of a “tripwire,” a set of circumstances under which the gray caps thought they could activate their Machine successfully? If so, what particular stimuli might have come into play? Could we predict when another such attempt might be made? And yet, even after the most minute study of ancient almanacs, historical accounts, the works of a number of statisticians such as Marmy Gort, and anything else we could lay our hands on, I still could not divine those finite, measurable values that might have created the ideal conditions. I concluded that the gray caps’ extraordinary ability to collect information, coupled with their additional spore-based senses, made it unlikely that we would ever be able to know. This did not stop me from continuing to try. Or continuing to ask the most important question: why build a Machine? And what—exactly—did it do?}

  We were to find out during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid that year just what happened when Ambergris collectively sprung a tripwire. For the bad Festival was like the antithesis of the Silence, sent to convince us that any semblance of law in the city was illusory, that it could not truly exist, whether we thought it resided in the palm of an obese, elderly Hoegbotton, a thin, ancient Frankwrithe, or the wizened visage of a Kalif none of us had ever seen.

  The night of the festival, the sun set red over the River Moth. Most of the crepe paper lanterns that people had set out had already been crushed by rubble or by the motored vehicles of opposing forces. The Kalif’s men had stepped up their bombardment of the city from without. They made no pretense anymore of aiming at anything in particular, their bombs as likely to crack open a hospital ward as a Hoegbotton sentry post. Really, it was as random as a heart attack. Why worry about what you cannot defend against? So we walked the streets as calmly as we had before the war, when we hadn’t been hunkered down against threats like a fungal bullet to the brain from some trigger-happy F&L recruit.

  No, gunfire couldn’t get to me. What terrified me as I looked out from my apartment at dusk was the proliferation of red flags.

  On the way back from our journalistic assignments that day, before we turned in our now infamous “The Kalif Yearns for Every Ambergrisian’s Head” article, the flags of the gray caps had appeared in multitudes—rhapsodies of red that seemed, like the ever-present fungus, always on the verge of forming some pattern, some message, only to fall apart into chaos again.

  As we approached Lacond’s offices in the late afternoon, the wind picked up. It rattled the gravel on side streets. It brought with it a strange premature twilight, and a smell that none could identify. Was it a smell come up off the river? It seemed bitter and pleasant, sharp and vague, all at once.

  The light, as Martin Lake might have said, had become different in Ambergris.

  We left Lacond’s offices tired and ready for rest, Duncan to his and Mary’s apartment, me to my own place much farther down Albumuth Boulevard in the opposite direction. {Not even Lacond could demand we cover the Festival, not that year. The Kalif’s troops were an unknown factor—they made us nervous, as had the uneventful Festival the year before.} Sybel had decided to take me up on my invitation and stay with me that night, just in case. Either we’d celebrate the Festival together or defend ourselves against it. {I left ample protections; I’m sorry they were not enough.} We had all been through many Festivals. We were old pros at it. We knew how to handle it.

  I had thought about making the trek to our mother’s mansion, but Duncan had assured me he could keep her safe. {She was quite safe, for several reasons, not least of which was her location: far enough upriver that the Kalif’s men had not requisitioned the house, and far enough from Ambergris that she would come to no harm from the gray caps.}

  Dusk had become night by the time Sybel arrived, breathless from running. After I let him in, I bolted the door behind him.

  “It’s not good out there,” he said, gasping for breath. “The trees are t
oo still. There’s a silence that’s…like I imagine what the Silence must have been like.”

  That was a thought. I felt light-headed for an instant, a conjoined chill and thrill. What if, tonight, we were to experience what the twenty-five thousand had experienced during the Silence, the city to become another vast experiment?

  “Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just another Festival. Help me with this.”

  We pushed a set of cabinets up against the door.

  “That should do it,” I said.

  Outside, a few dozen drunken youths passed by, shouting as they stumbled their way past.

  “Death to the Kalif!” I heard, and a flurry of cursing.

  “They’ll be lucky if they survive the hour,” Sybel said. “And it won’t be the Kalif that kills them, either.”

  “When did you become so cheerful?” I asked.

  He gave me a look and went back to loading his gun. We had pistols and knives, which Sybel had managed to purchase from, of all people, a Kalif officer. There was a booming black market in weapons these days. Some wags speculated that the Kalif had invaded Ambergris to create demand for inventory.

  Meanwhile, the gray caps had spores and fungal bombs, and Truff knew what else.

  “Do you think we’re much safer in here?” I asked.

  Sybel smiled. “No. Not much safer.”

  There seemed about him that night more than a hint of self-awareness, mixed with that rarest of commodities for Sybel: contentment. {It was only rare to you because you never saw him in his natural element.}

  We didn’t board up the window until much later, fearful of losing the thread of what was going on outside. The full moon drooped, misshapen and diffuse, in the darkening sky.

  Through that smudged fog of glass, we watched rivulets and outcroppings of the Festival walk or run by. Clowns, magicians, stiltmen, and ordinary citizens with no special talent, who had put on bright clothes and gone out because—quite frankly—in the middle of war, how much worse could the Festival possibly make things? True, without the great influx of visitors from other cities there wasn’t nearly the number of people that we had become accustomed to seeing, but Sybel and I still agreed it was a more potent Festival than had been predicted by the so-called experts. {Including us, Janice, in our column in the Broadsheet.}

  Then the merrymakers began to trail off. Soon the groups had thinned until it was only one or two people at a time, either drunk and careless, or alert and hurrying quickly to their destinations. Every once in a while, something would explode in the background as the Kalif’s men kept at it. The bright orange flame of the shuddering explosions was oddly reassuring. As long as it stayed far away from us, that is. At least we knew where it was coming from. {Yes, with all the force of His benevolent, if distant, love.}

  Sybel and I sat there looking out the window like it was our last view of the world.

  “Remember when we used to host parties in abandoned churches on Festival night?” Sybel said. He looked very old then, in that light, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth undeniable.

  “Yes, I remember,” I said, smiling. “That was a lot of fun. It really was.”

  At least, more fun than the war. I didn’t want to return to those days, either, though.

  Sybel smiled back. Had we ever been close? I search my memory now, thinking of the glance we exchanged back then. No, not close, but comfortable, which is almost more intimate. In the preparations for countless parties, in seeing Sybel day after day at my gallery, a deep affection had built up between us.

  “Maybe after the war, I can…” The words felt like such a lie, I couldn’t continue. “Maybe the gallery can…”

  Sybel nodded and looked away in, I believe, embarrassment. “That would be good,” he said.

  We continued to watch the city through our window: that fungi-tinged, ever-changing painting.

  Finally, it began to happen, at least three hours after nightfall. A stillness crept into the city. The only people on the street were armed and running. Once, a dozen members of a Hoegbotton militia hurried by in tight formation, their weapons gleaming with the reflected light of the fires. Then, for a while, nothing. The moon and the one or two remaining street lamps, spluttery, revealed an avenue on which no one moved, where the lack of breeze was so acute that crumpled newspapers on the sidewalk lay dead-still.

  “It’s coming,” Sybel muttered. “I don’t know what it is, but it’ll happen soon.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just a lull.”

  But a chill had crept over me, as it seemed to have crept over the city. It lodged in my throat, my belly, my legs. Somehow, I too could feel it coming, like a physical presence. As if my nerves were the nerves of the city. Something had entered Ambergris. {Creeping through your nervous system, the gray caps’ spores, creating fear and doubt, right on schedule. I’d put the antidote in your food, but an antidote only works for so long against the full force of such efforts.}

  The street lights went out.

  Even the moon seemed to gutter and wane a little. Then the lights came back on—all of them—but they were fungus green, shining in a way that hardly illuminated anything. Instead, this false light created fog, confusion, fear.

  Sybel cursed.

  “Should we barricade the window?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Sybel said. “Not yet. This might be the end of it, you know. This might…” Now it was his turn to trail off. We both knew this would not be the end of it.

  We began to see people again on the street below. This time, they ran for their lives. We could not help them without endangering ourselves, and so we watched, frozen, at the window, beyond even guilt. A woman with no shoes on, her long hair trailing out behind her, ran through our line of vision. Her mouth was wide, but no sound came from it. A few seconds later, some thing appeared in the gutter near the sidewalk. It tried to stand upright like a person, tottered grotesquely, then dropped all pretense and loped out of sight after the woman. The roar of the Kalif’s mortar fire followed on its heels.

  “What was that?” I hissed at Sybel. “What in Truff ’s name?”

  Sybel didn’t reply. Sybel was whispering something in his native language, the singsong chirp of the Nimblytod Tribe. I couldn’t understand it, but it sounded soothing. Except I was beyond being soothed.

  Then a man came crawling down the street, shapes in the shadows pulling at his legs. Still he crawled, past all fear, past all doubt. Until, as the Kalif’s mortars let out a particularly raucous shout, something pulled him off the street, out of view.

  Silence again. I was shaking by that time. My teeth were grinding together. I’d never understood that your teeth could actually grind involuntarily, could chatter when they weren’t grinding. Sybel made me bite down on a piece of cloth.

  “The sound,” he whispered. “They’ll hear you.” {If they heard you, it is because they “heard” my protections on the door of your apartment—my attempt to help you may have endangered you instead.}

  The street lay empty, save for the suggestion of shapes at the edge of our line of sight.

  Suddenly, the Kalif’s mortar fire, which had been progressing in a regular circle around the city, became erratic. Several explosions occurred at once, quite near us, the characteristic whistle of destruction so banal I didn’t even think of it as a threat at first. The ceiling lifted, the floor trembled, dust floated down.

  Then nothing for several minutes. Then another eruption of explosions, farther away. On the outskirts of Ambergris, gouts of flame lit up the night sky, whiter than the moon. Slowly, as the fires spread, it became clear that the conflagration was forming a circle around Ambergris.

  We watched it spread, silent, unable to find words for our unease.

  After a while, Sybel said, in a flat voice, “Did you notice?”

  “What?”

  “The Kalif’s mortars have been silenced.”

  “Yes, yes they have,” I said.

  Nothing rational told us t
hat the Kalif’s positions had been overrun, but we knew it to be true regardless. Someone or something had attacked the Kalif’s troops. And yet not even H&S or F&L would have been foolhardy enough to launch an attack on so unpredictable an evening as Festival night.

  That is when we decided to board up the window. Some things should not be seen, if at all possible.

  Shall I tell you Duncan’s crime during the Festival, in Mary’s eyes? While Sybel and I boarded up my apartment window, Duncan was leading Mary to safety—just not a safety she had expected or particularly wanted. It was not the safety provided by a living necklace of acclaim and warmly muttered praise. It was not the kind of safety that reinforces trust or love. For where could Duncan possibly be safe with the surface in so much turmoil? I think you already know, my dear reader, if you’ve followed me this far. Some of us read to discover. Some of us read to discover what we already know. Duncan read Mary the wrong way. He thought he knew her. He was wrong. How do I know? His journal tells me so. It’s all in there.

  I took Mary underground as the Festival raged above. Truff help me, I did. Why I thought this might be a good thing for us beyond ensuring our immediate survival, I don’t know. The Kalif’s men were too close to our home, and I could sense the gray caps getting even closer. The spores in my skin rose to the surface and pointed in their direction. My skin was literally pulling in their direction, yearning to join them—that was how close to turning traitor my body had become. Besides, some F&L louts were five doors down, beating an old woman senseless. It seemed clear they’d reach our door before long.

  “Do you trust me?” I asked Mary. She was pale and shaking. She wouldn’t look at me, but she nodded. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved her more than at that moment, as she left everything familiar behind. I kissed her. “Get your jacket,” I told her. “Bring the canteen from the kitchen.”

  And then we set off. The place I meant to take her was underground, yes, but a place rarely inhabited by gray caps. The entrance lay halfway between our home and the F&L thugs. We had to hurry. We were scurrying to a rat hole before the other rats could catch us. I had my greatcoat on, which I had seeded with a few varieties of camouflaging fungi. I was carrying an umbrella for some reason—I don’t even remember why anymore. Except I remember joking with Mary about it, to make her laugh, at least a little bit. But she was too scared, frozen. I really think she thought we were both about to die. Thankfully, I was more or less human right then, or she would have been out of her mind with terror. When you can’t count on your lover to stay in one consistent shape….